HORTICULTURAL SOCIETY. 261 



success which has blessed our efforts. We assemble here under 

 pleasant auspices and it is my hope that our deliberations may 

 prove so inststructive and profitable to you all that you will each 

 one of you feel, as you return to your daily duties, that you have 

 been amply repaid for the time and expense of attending this 

 meeting and that you have done your duty by contributing your 

 mite in spreading a knowledge of our industry among those who 

 know it not, where, like a kind word to the afflicted, or a messenger 

 from Heaven, it may bring encouragement to our farmers, comfort 

 and happiness to their homes, and prosperity to the state. 



We meet for the attainment and promotion of knowledge we 

 should radiate as well as absorb and strive to instruct those who 

 know less than ourselves, while we learn from those who know 

 more, and so become benefactors to the community, while we 

 strengthen and improve ourselves. The contact of mind with 

 mind in social intercourse; descriptions of our experiments our 

 failures and successes; the details of our work; facts learned by 

 observation and experience gained in the practical everyday work 

 of the apiary as well as ideas gleaned from careful painstaking 

 study and search, and clothed in the simplest language of our 

 daily lives, are of the greatest value in contributing to knowledge 

 of the possibilities within our reach "when by the aid of science 

 we secure 1he stores by nature given. 



Bear with me for a moment if I glance at the magnificent re- 

 sources of our adopted state — well named "Star of the North" — 

 from Iowa to the Lake of the Woods, from the Dakotas to the 

 Mississippi and the "Zenith City of the unsalted seas," 83,000 

 square miles. Forest and praries with splendid vegetation and 

 luxuriant flower and every acre of its fertile soil exuberant with 

 nectar and even the leaves exuding honey from every puncture. 



We look with pardonable pride at her wonderful grain fields. 

 We are lost in admiration as we are told of her 35,000,000 bushels 

 of wheat, of her 60,000,000 bushels of oats, of her 30,000,000 bush- 

 els of corn, of her millions of rye and barley and buckwheat. We 

 listen with eager attention hours, days, and weeks to our able In- 

 stitute lecturers and stand with open-mouthed astonishment as they 

 tell us how to milk the cows, make the butter and feed the hogs, 

 and worry our vexed heads in contriving how we may squeeze an- 

 other dollar out of the old farm; yet not one in a thousand of the 

 farmers of Minnesota ever thought of the fact that more cash value 

 of honey was permitted to go to waste every summer than the whole 

 aggregate cash value of the wheat, rye and oats. 



It is the estimate of careful men that such a state as ours will 

 yield an average annual product of 10,000 lbs. of honey per square 

 mile. This would give 830,000,000 lbs., or 100,000,000 dollars' 

 worth for the state. Is this crop worth saving? If it is, we should 

 recommend such practical measures as will help others to benefit 

 themselves by saving this product of nature which is placed within 

 their reach. If he is a benefactor who makes two blades of grass 

 grow where one grew before, what is he who eoables the rural pop- 

 ulation to utilize and save from loss that substanee that would 



